The Three Biggest Pitfalls to Transforming Your Company

2 weeks ago

By Steven L. Blue

Many rust-belt company CEOs blame their company’s failure on everything under the sun: automation, offshore labor, AI, and even their own employees. What these CEOs don’t realize is that the number one reason their company failed was because of themselves. THEY decided to live in “happy land” and live off the successes of yesterday. THEY chose to ignore the margins and new technology. THEY didn’t take the initiative to transform.

But while transforming an organization to higher technology products can be successful, it’s risky, expensive and unlike anything you’ve ever done before.

The following are the three biggest pitfalls to transforming your company from rust-belt to high-tech:

The workforce is not
prepared for the change. Let’s assume that you’re a rust belt manufacturer, and you
make plastic things, metal stamping, low tech or no tech kind of products. Your
workforce doesn’t know how to do anything any differently, and it’s not their
fault. The worst thing you could do is tell them that they will either become
electronic engineers or they get the boot. But long before you make skills
transitions, you must make a cultural transformation. A culture that has done
the same things the same way for decades cannot deal with a new paradigm of
doing new things in different ways every day. You need a culture that is not
only amenable to change, but anxious for it. I tell CEOs all the time when I
make keynote addresses, “The cultural model in your mind should be a Cirque du
Soleil® culture.” You want people who come to work every day all jazzed up, and
the only thing they want today is to be better than yesterday. And of course,
the push back is, “Well, our employees are not circus performers and they hate
their jobs.” Well, whose fault is that?

People are excited to
innovate, but they don’t know how to do it. Employees are afraid if they don’t magically
become “innovative”, they’ll be fired. So, the CEO must ignite the spark for
innovation. Train them how to be innovative. Train them how to be creative. At
Miller Ingenuity, I hired the Ex Chief Creativity Officer from the QVC Network
to do this. He rode shotgun with my employees for the better part of a year
until they could do it on their own. You must train them in the fundamentals of
brainstorming.

Bringing high-tech
products to the market wearing the same old marketing clothes. Long before you launch
new high-tech products, you must reposition the image of the company in the
market from rust-belt to high-tech. You must disrupt the market to get its
attention. You must disrupt your competitors to keep them off guard. That means
shedding the tired old ways rust-belt companies go to market in favor of new
tech ways. Gone should be the days of trade pub ads that say nothing, trade
show booths that have more competitors than customers in them, and sales calls
that don’t ask for orders but ask for tee-times. You should be very creative in this endeavor,
otherwise the market won’t even notice. At Miller Ingenuity, we just filmed and
released a television series—our flagship product in the high technology space
is a life safety product. My team and I had a professional film company produce
a 13-episode video series called “Safety Starts Here.” It’s really a
thinly-veiled advertorial for our safety products, but because it goes through
a logical and professionally produced series, it’s almost like you’re watching
a television show. And it positions us and further deepens the perception in
the marketplace that we are a high-technology company.

If you’re running a rust-belt company, the longer you wait to radically transform it, the better the odds are your last play will be a Hail Mary. . . and it will fail. I promise you, if you take this one step at a time, carefully and deliberately, you won’t believe the metamorphosis that will occur.

Steven L. Blue is the President & CEO of
Miller Ingenuity, an innovative company revolutionizing traditional safety
solutions for railway workers, and author of the new book, Metamorphosis: From Rust-Belt to High-Tech
in a 21st Century World. For more
information, please visit www.StevenLBlue.com, www.milleringenuity.com and
connect with Blue on Twitter, @StevenLBlue.